BREAKING NEWS: Design

A Manual Pre-Drilling, Screwdriving & Hook Driving Tool

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 15:45:34 +0000

This peculiar tool may not make sense to a tradesperson who always has a cordless tool on their hip.

The Trio, by Japanese hand tool manufacturer Star-M, is an unpowered object with three functions: It can pre-drill holes, drive a screw, and install hooks.

The tool caught my eye because I live on a rural property. Sheds and outbuildings often need plenty of hooks and screws for hanging things, and for small jobs, it'd be easier to have one of these handy than even a cordless drill.

It comes in two sizes: An "S" for #1 screws and an "M" for #2 screws. Anything bigger than that, yeah, you're trekking back to the house for the drill.

UI Experimentation: A Keyboard That Doubles as a Massive Trackpad

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 14:35:32 +0000

As a product of the 20th century, I prefer physical buttons to touch-capacitive surfaces. But I appear to be in the minority; gadget manufacturers today love fitting their objects out with the latter. This CLVX 1 keyboard, by Belarusian manufacturer Clevetura, is a strange hybrid. It's a full-size keyboard with actual scissor-switch keys that, collectively, serve as a swipeable touchpad.

The big question is, why? The company claims, as all tech manufacturers love to, increased productivity. "Seamless switching between typing and gestures speeds up your workflow like never before," they assert.

The keyboard is pre-programmed to recognize the trackpad gestures Apple has for their Macs. Touch mode is activated automatically, so users can switch between touching and swiping "seamlessly."

The CLVX 1 has been successfully Kickstarted, with 22 days left to pledge at press time. The units are going for $200 and are scheduled to ship in July.

An Ergonomic Scoop that Dispenses Ice Cream in Cylinders

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 14:35:32 +0000

Fun fact: In the early- to mid-20th century, American drug stores and pharmacies used to have counters with soda fountains where they sold both fizzy drinks and freshly-scooped ice cream.

What do those things have to do with medicine? There are two conventional explanations: One is that carbonated beverages were thought to have medicinal properties and promoted proper digestion. The second is that pharmacists could apply their knowledge of chemistry to concocting palatable sodas.

But the true motivation for drug stores selling soda and ice cream, as with most things in the modern world, is more stark: Money. ""If you have a line of business [where] your customer base is taking care of those who don't feel well," Scott Besci told L.A. Eater, "and they only come to you once or twice a year, you need a reason for customers to come in more often."

Besci should know. He's the general manager of the Thrifty Ice Cream factory outside of L.A. Thrifty traces their roots to SoCal's Thrify Drug Stores, launched in 1929. That chain, run by brothers Harry and Robert Borun, "sold single scoops of ice cream for only 5 cents, using the cheaply priced sweet as a loss leader product to entice customers to visit more often."

After the 1930s the Borun brothers realized they could make more profit if they cut out the middlemen and made their own ice cream, and they opened the Thrifty Ice Cream plant in 1940.

There was something very unique about the ice cream sold at Thrifty Drug Stores—and it had to do with both ergonomics and portion control. Scooping frozen ice cream out of a bin was physically difficult, particularly for smaller workers. So the Borun brothers outfitted their chains with a specially-commissioned cylindrical scoop—designer unknown, sadly—that employed the user's body weight, rather than arm strength, to extract ice cream from the bin.

"You just put [the scooper] in the container, you push your weight against it, so no matter how petite or how big a person you are, you can push that down, simply turn it 90 degrees, and pull up and have a perfectly formed ice cream scoop," Becsi explains.

A large trigger on the scoop activated a push-out mechanism that ejected the ice cream. Because the scooper was barrel-shaped, the ice cream came out in a cylindrical shape of roughly uniform amount.

The cylindrical shape also made it easier to stack multiple flavors.

This ergonomics-borne invention also yielded a branding benefit. Thrifty Ice Cream came to be associated with the cylindrical shape, which you couldn't find elsewhere.

Today Thrifty Drug Stores no longer exist; they were acquired by Rite Aid in the '90s. But Rite Aid shrewdly kept the Thrifty Ice Cream brand around. And, since they own the I.P. for the scoop, are now making a few extra bucks by selling the distinctive scoop to the public.

It retails for $27.

This New $20 IKEA Storage Gem Instantly Organizes Any Entryway

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 14:15:00 +0000

And it's surprisingly stylish! READ MORE...

10 Stores Like Party City to Shop for Balloons and More

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 13:30:00 +0000

From $5 essentials to customized supplies, here’s where to go. READ MORE...

I Test Furniture for a Living — These Loveseats Are Perfect for Small Spaces

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 12:45:00 +0000

There’s something for every style and budget. READ MORE...

I Tried This "Layered Storage" Hack to Fix My Cluttered Cube Organizer

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 12:30:00 +0000

It was shockingly simple. READ MORE...

This DTC-era darling has a plan for navigating Trump’s tariffs

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Billy May is now deeply familiar with the intricacies of bedsheet factories. In 2023, May became CEO of Brooklinen. A retail veteran, he’s spent his career in top roles at J.Crew and Abercrombie, before becoming CEO of Sur La Table. But now, as head of a millennial-loved bedsheet brand, he’s learning about the warp and weft of cotton sheets, and which countries have the most expertise in manufacturing bedding. (“Portugal and India are leading fabric-producing countries,” he tells me.)

May has been tasked with helping Brooklinen transition from a DTC startup into a nationally-known brand. He believes the way to do that is to create high quality sheets that you cannot get anywhere else. So Brooklinen is now redesigning all of its key products so they have unique fabrications. For instance, it has worked closely with its factory in Portugal to update its linen sheets to a weave that is exclusively available at Brooklinen; it’s softer and stronger than before, and made from traceable European flax. Brooklinen relaunches these linen sheets today, but we can expect the brand to unveil redesigned versions of its other classics in the months to come.

[Photo: Brooklinen]

This year, however, there’s been a new wrinkle in May’s plans: Trump’s tariffs. The administration has already announced steep levies on Canada, Mexico, and China which go into effect today, but it has also threatened tariffs on the European Union and India, which is where Brooklinen makes the majority of its products.

May isn’t panicking. He’s strategizing. “I’ve been here before,” he says, referring to his tenure as CEO of Sur La Table during the last Trump presidency. “There are things we can do to mitigate the risk.”

What Brooklinen Learned From the DTC Movement

To understand Brooklinen’s deep relationship with factories in India, Portugal, and Turkey it’s important to understand the brand’s origin story.

The company was founded in 2013 by a husband and wife team, Rich and Vicki Fulop, who wanted to make it more accessible for everyday people to afford the kind of luxurious sheets you get at a hotel. They studied the bedding supply chain, then tapped factories that made sheets for high-end brands. They believed they could price these products more affordably by selling them directly to consumers without a retail markup. This was a playbook they had seen from a new crop of DTC brands, like Everlane, Bonobos, and Warby Parker.

Over the next decade, hundreds of other DTC brands would enter the market, from Casper to Away to Allbirds. And, as Fast Company has reported in detail, many of these brands struggled in their efforts to scale and become profitable. One problem was simply how much competition there was. At one time, there were hundreds of brands making mattresses similar to Casper’s and dozens of brands making suitcases similar to Away’s. This also happened in the bedsheet industry. As Fulop said in Fast Company, “I made a tactical mistake: I just told everyone about this amazing niche that we’re in, and now we have all these competitors.”

[Photo: Brooklinen]

Many DTC brands failed to compete in this environment and folded. Brooklinen was among the survivors, and May says the brand is profitable. To transition to the next stage of growth, May believes that product differentiation is the only way forward. Brooklinen’s original pitch to customers was that it offered high quality. But now, May also wants to ensure the products are truly unique, such as the new linen sheets. If a customer falls in love with them, they cannot get this fabrication anywhere but Brooklinen.

But to create these high quality fabrications, May says that Brooklinen needs to have close relationships with its factory partners. They work closely with their partners to create prototypes, source materials, and get certifications, like the one that traces the origins of the flax in the linen. “These are deep, long-term partnerships,” says May. “It’s the only way to create a high quality product.”

[Photo: Brooklinen]

Brooklinen’s Tariff Strategy

Trump’s tariffs threaten to undo many brands’ relationships with their factory partners. Brands that produce products in China and Mexico, for instance, are suddenly going to pay significantly more to import their products into the United States.

When the tariffs were first announced, some brands said they would immediately start finding factories outside of China. Steve Madden’s CEO, for instance, said he would start exploring factories in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Brazil. But this can have an impact on product quality. It takes years to build a relationship with a factory and work closely to ensure products are made to a brands’ standards. Moreover, some countries have far more expertise in making particular products. China, for instance, has thousands of footwear factories that have been making products for American brands for decades—with a workforce that is well trained in manufacturing. Finding factories in other countries that can make products at a similar quality can be a challenge.

May says that Brooklinen has not been immediately affected by this first wave of products because it manufactures primarily in Europe and India. But the Trump administration has already threatened tariffs on both of these territories, and May is strategizing about what to do.

[Photo: Brooklinen]

Rather than abandoning factories, May’s first step is to work even more closely with them to navigate looming tariffs. In many cases, factories bear the brunt of tariffs, since they are exporting products to overseas warehouses. Some American brands will refuse to pay the higher costs incurred by the tariffs, so the factories will have to simply absorb these costs. But May is already talking with factory partners about how to share the burden. “We’re working hand in glove with them on ways to share any potential cost increases,” he says. “It’s been an ongoing dialogue.”

For May, this isn’t just a responsible thing to do. It’s also an important way to ensure that the company can maintain quality, since it has spent years working closely with these factories to make sure the product is exactly how they want it.

That said, having run a retail business in Trump’s previous term, which also involved tariffs, May says it’s important to have many tools to mitigate cost increases. Right now, the company is identifying its bestselling products that are always in stock, then preemptively sourcing materials and manufacturing large quantities, in case Trump makes good on tariffs.

And in the longer term, May is expanding its network of factories. Over the course of the last year, it has added 10 new factory partners across many different countries and started training them to make its products. This is partly because Brooklinen is growing fast and needs to be able to expand its capacity. But as new potential tariffs emerge, May says there will be some flexibility to increase orders in places where tariffs are lower.

May is also taking this moment as a chance to innovate. As Brooklinen explores new factories, it is also thinking about how it can develop new kinds of products that customers are looking for. It has developed a waffle blanket at one of its new factories so that it has a proprietary weave that holds its shape better and has a deeper pocket. It has also redesigned its plush towels with its Turkish factory to give them a unique fabrication that is more densely woven so it is softer and absorbs water quicker.

Ultimately, May believes this moment of economic uncertainty doesn’t need to squash innovation and growth. In some ways, it might even spur it. “We think about other companies we admire like Apple and BMW,” he says. “They don’t rest on their laurels, but are constantly innovating product, and that’s how they keep their edge.”

This clever case has a simple solution for smartphone addiction: Make the screen smaller—much smaller

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Our phones are making us unhappy, but I’m not sure cutting myself off from humanity’s universe of information with a dumbphone is the answer. It’s kind of like how we know walking is healthier than driving, but it’s a moot point when the average person lives 27 miles from their workplace.

However, maybe our smartphones don’t need a lobotomy. Maybe they just need to respect our boundaries.

This is an idea explored in a new concept called Aperture, by the London studio Special Projects. It’s a case that crops your smartphone into a small square of your screen when you flip your case over, revealing a series of smart widgets.

[Image: Special Projects]

By the same firm that developed ideas like discrete, skin-pressed messages for Blackberry and a Paper Phone for Google, Aperture was inspired when Adrian Westaway, cofounder and director of technology and magic at Special Projects, flipped his iPhone case backward and saw a little window left open where the cameras were supposed to be.

[Image: Special Projects]

Senior designer Matteo Bandi ran with this idea in UI renderings, imagining a system in your full-feature smartphone could deliver a tiny version of just a few apps you need. These widgets might be a camera, step-by-step instructions pulled from a recipe, or even a compass pointing you toward your destination. It’s a smartphone’s function without the fluff. Most of these experiences are even presented in stoic black and white—slicing back the candy colors behind another dopamine hit. But the demo still finds a few moments of whimsy, largely through its little smiling mascots. (The mascots really come to life when, sitting at a table with friends, the faces from each phone look at one another and hop into a cozy ball.)

[Image: Special Projects]

“We’re trying to find the right balance between being helpful and not preachy,” says Clara Gaggero Westaway, cofounder and creative director at Special Projects. “It’s like, we don’t want to take technology away, but how can we help people to use technology in a way that makes them have a better life?”

[Image: Special Projects]

Aperture is clever but admittedly not entirely original. Special Projects points to all sorts of precedent within the industry playing with this same idea. UX designers have been exploring the concept for more than a decade now, from a very charming birdhouse alarm clock, to an Apple patent for a smart iPad case that reveals just part of the screen, to the current Samsung Smart View case that allows you to see the time, answer a call, and skip the track of a song.

[Image: Special Projects]

But Aperture is framed a bit differently than any of these approaches. Part of that sensation might simply come down to the fact that Aperture wouldn’t be as slickly integrated as Samsung’s Smart View that easily folds open and closed. Instead, the team imagines you literally take your case off and turn it around, opting into and out of the experience.

“One of the words that I think is quite key is friction,” says Gaggero Westaway. “You cannot use it compulsively. You almost have to have a conscious behavior to say, ‘Okay, [now] I’m gonna take it off and doomscroll again.”

[Image: Special Projects]

At face value, we have products that get close to Aperture’s core idea. The Apple Watch’s original pitch was to be a product that kept you from looking at your phone, and its screen size isn’t so different from what an Aperture case would be. But Special Projects bristles just a bit at the idea of selling technology to amend your relationship with technology.

“There’s also something weird about it feeling like you’ve made a new object,” Westaway says. “Like you can have two things in your hands that you’ve always had, and then you just [put them together]. And now it’s reshaped.”

[Image: Special Projects]

The other thing that Aperture reveals is what exactly makes our phones feel toxic these days. Tools to help with cooking and navigation feel additive to our experience. Screen time, in these senses, feels positive to our well-being. It’s when trying to picture something like an Instagram or TikTok feed squeezing into that little window that my stomach lurches just a bit, and the mechanisms of addiction reveal themselves.

Instead of a mini social feed, Special Projects imagined that Aperture would instead offer a break from social media. So if you’re using Instagram when you flip your case around, Aperture will present a focus timer for you to do anything else but be on your phone. “We sort of arbitrarily translated [Instagram as a] timer as an escape. I think that will be a space for us to explore,” Bandi says, noting there are many ways to frame dedicated time to do something else.

[Image: Special Projects]

Aperture would be a challenging concept to bring to market, especially on iPhones, which have more rigid limitations than Androids. But a Special Projects client has expressed interest, and promised funding, to help commercialize the idea (probably in the form of a case you can buy). And with the advent of generative AI, it becomes easier to imagine how some of Aperture’s mini app interpretations, like its recipes, could feasibly work.

[Image: Special Projects]

But for now, Special Projects is putting Aperture’s earliest incarnations into the wild to solicit feedback, and understand what customers might want in such a product before realizing it for market.

“We were just putting this out as a thought piece, and were absolutely not going to try and commercialize it. Then this [funding] opportunity came up,” Westaway says. “Rather than disappear for a year, we thought we could have an exploratory approach.”

This new emoji is all of us in 2025

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Apple rolled out its iOS 18.4 update yesterday, and mixed in with new notification tweaks, an expansion of Apple Intelligence features, and some changes to Photos, there’s a hidden gem that’s destined to become an enduring symbol of 2025.

IOS 18.4 comes with eight new emoji, including a radish, fingerprint, purple paint splatter, harp, and, weirdly, the flag of Sark—an island off the coast of France which has a population of just over 500 (according to the blog Emojipedia, this last can be chalked up to a legal workaround.) But one of the new emoji stands out from the pack: “Face With Bags Under Eyes,” an expressive new “smiley” face. It’s about to be unavoidable on X, TikTok, and in group chats everywhere.

“Face With Bags Under Eyes” is a beleaguered little guy with drooping lids, dark circles, lowered eyebrows, and a mouth represented by a single straight line. It has the kind of resigned expression of someone who’s well past their limit, but is still soldiering on. It’s an elementary school teacher who’s “not mad, just disappointed.” It’s a corporate worker who’s opened his Outlook inbox to 47 unread emails. It’s a parent returning home to find a sink full of dishes. It’s all of us.

And in an era when scrolling through X, buying eggs, or checking Zillow for local home prices can foster enough existential dread that smashing your laptop and fleeing the country feels like the only option left, “Face With Bags Under Eyes” is not just an emoji—he’s also a sign of the times.

Under a tweet revealing iOS 18.4’s new emoji, one commenter predicted, “I bet this is the most used emoji of the year. 3 months into 2025 and everyone is already tired.” Another user added, “Never thought they’d approve an emoji of me in Unicode.” And a third managed to sum up how we all feel about the update: “God this is me rn.” The new emojis, included this extremely usable haggard one, are available now.

All the drama surrounding Meghan Markle’s new brand, As Ever, explained

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Meghan Markle has been teasing the launch of her lifestyle brand, now called As Ever, for a while now, and Markle finally revealed its product line earlier this week. But while followers of the Duchess of Sussex are just now learning what her brand will offer, Markle’s fledging business has already faced its fair share of controversy.

In the spring of 2024, Markle dropped the first hint at a potential business in the form of several artisanal jars of jam sent to various celebrity friends, each branded with the name “American Riviera Orchard.” The next update didn’t arrive until this February, when Markle announced on Instagram that she had scrapped the “American Riviera Orchard” brand for As Ever. Most recently, in a newsletter mailed to subscribers this Monday, Markle offered some insight into As Ever’s first product drop, which will include a raspberry spread, wildflower honey, dried flower sprinkles, various teas, and crepe and shortbread mixes.

So far, it’s unclear when exactly As Ever’s products will be on sale, how much they’ll cost, and whether Markle plans to branch out from food and beverage into other types of lifestyle products. As fans of Markle await these details, fans of the drama are paying attention to several other stories overshadowing As Ever’s launch—including a legal dispute over its logo, concerns about the originality of its new name, and critiques around the tone of its marketing.

Here’s everything you need to know about the drama surrounding As Ever.

A logo mishap

The strangest controversy that’s popped up around As Ever has to do with its logo. The brand’s emblem—a white-on-gold line drawing inside an elegant, elongated octagon—features a palm tree bookended by two symmetrical hummingbirds. An anonymous source told Vanity Fair that the brand chose the tree as a reference to Markle’s home in California, while the hummingbirds are a favorite of Markle’s husband, Prince Harry.

But some outside viewers have been skeptical of the inspiration behind the design. Critics noted that the design looked oddly similar to the historic coat of arms used by Porreres, a small town in Majorca, Spain, since the 1400s. In an interview with The Sun in February, the mayor of Porreres, Francisca Mora Veny, said she was considering legal action against As Ever for the logo (though she went on to admit that she may not be able to afford such a challenge).

The As Ever logo (left) and the Porreres coat of arms (right)

“We don’t want our coat of arms to be perverted,” Veny said, adding, “The only difference with their logo and our coat of arms is that theirs shows two hummingbirds and ours are either swallows or pigeons—historians cannot agree.” In a further statement to the publication El País, she said, “It’s a total copy.”

So far, it’s unclear whether Veny has reached out directly to Markle, or whether she plans to move forward with a legal dispute.

New name, new challenges

The change of brand name from “American Riviera Orchard” to “As Ever” has also drawn some unwanted attention to Markle’s business.

In her Instagram announcement video, Markle shared that she originally chose “American Riviera” to represent her neighborhood, Santa Barbara, but she found that the title would limit her business to selling items that were manufactured and grown in the area. So, she explained in the video, she opted instead for “As Ever,” a name that she claimed was secured in 2022.

Based on an application filed to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Markle’s team submitted a request for the As Ever trademark on September 17, 2024. Per the document, the application had been approved by the examining attorney but had not yet been published as of March 26.

Since Markle announced the name change back in February, at least two businesses of the same name have come forward to express their surprise. The first is a New York-based clothing brand called As Ever, run by owner Mark Kolski since 2017. Kolski told Vanity Fair that he was surprised not to have received advance notice about Markle’s brand, but that he didn’t plan to make any changes to his own business or to take action against Markle.

“If they had intentions of making clothes out of the gate then it could have been a problem,” Kolski said. “They’re choosing not to make clothing at this time, but that could change. I have no interest in having any public forum battle against this new venture. That’s not who I am.”

Jen Corbett, owner of the company As Ever Photography, has taken a similar stance to Kolski. In an initial Instagram post reacting to Markle’s branding, she wrote, “When one of the most famous people in the world starts using your biz name of 12+ years (that you named in honor of your grandmother), seems like they could throw me a lil bone?” However, that post has since been deleted, and Corbett has posted a follow-up story to clarify that, “I had a bit of fun posting about Meghan Markle using my biz name, but I am in no way interested in hate mongering against her.”

As Ever’s perception problem

Aside from its branding, As Ever is also drawing some backlash for the tone of its marketing.

On As Ever’s new website, a message to fans notes, “As Ever is more than a brand—it’s a love language.” And in her newsletter sent to fans this week, Markle explained that her raspberry spread’s “keepsake packaging” could be repurposed to hold “love notes” or “special treasures.”

In response to that suggestion, Margaret Hartmann, senior editor at The New Yorker, quipped that Markle’s latest “big idea” is “rinsing and reusing jam jars.” It’s a jab that builds on commentary surrounding Markle’s Netflix show, With Love, Meghan, which was widely criticized for presenting an out-of-touch look at Markle’s privileged life in Montecito (one particularly harsh review from The Guardian labeled it “toe-curlingly unlovable.”)

It’s difficult to cast a judgment on Markle’s new brand just yet, considering that its products haven’t even dropped (though the number of number of issues As Ever has faced with its branding so far does seem concerning for such a new company.) If As Ever’s luxe look is anything to go by, Markle’s raspberry spread isn’t going to retail for prices one might find in the grocery store—in which case, it doesn’t seem likely that the brand will do much to repair the image of inauthenticity that’s plagued Markle’s other ventures as of late.

3 things Seth Rogen’s ‘The Studio’ gets right about brands and Hollywood

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 09:30:00 +0000

It’s telling that the plot premise of the first episode for the new Apple show The Studio—episode three drops today—revolves entirely around the notion of a Kool-Aid movie.

Created by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the entire show revolves around the elevation of Rogen’s character Matt Remick to studio head, a job he got only because he committed to getting into bed with the brand IP of a 98-year-old beverage. How the premiere episode subsequently ties in Martin Scorcese and a film about Jonestown to the Kool-Aid brand is both hilariously absurd and somehow absolutely believable.

Speaking of believable, watch the scene in which filmmaker Nick Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Captain Underpants, Neighbors) pitches Remick his Kool-Aid script idea and tell me it couldn’t be hitting theaters next summer.

There is a scene in the first episode that undoubtedly had marketers of all stripes howling with laughter and cringing with recognition. It takes place in a boardroom of the fictional film studio Continental Studios, in which newly promoted Remick tells the studio’s head of marketing (played by Kathryn Hahn) that they will be making a movie based on Kool-Aid brand IP.

“Let’s fucking go!” exclaims Hahn’s character, holding a giant Stanley cup. “I could sell the fuck out of that!”

Kathryn Hahn and Chase Sui Wonders [Photo: Apple TV+]

We then get a very short, yet incredibly accurate, summary of the current tension in Hollywood when it comes to brand IP. Remick details why Barbie was successful. “It had Greta Gerwig, a writer-director behind it,” he says. “It had a filmmaker’s vision. That’s what we’re going to do with Kool-Aid. We’re going to make the auteur-driven, Oscar-winning Kool-Aid film.”

Hahn’s character groans. “Oh fuck me, you want to make a fucking fancy Kool-Aid movie?” she says. “Why? Nobody even fucking watches the Oscars anymore. Did Mario Bros win an Oscar? No, it didn’t. But you know what it did win? $1.3 billion.”

Rogen said last week on the podcast Armchair Expert that prior to writing the show, he and Goldberg interviewed just about every studio head, and their heads of marketing. As profanely hysterical as this show is, its depiction of the relationship between Hollywood, marketing, and brands is rooted in an immediately recognizable reality.

I spoke to sources that include execs and creatives who work across brands and entertainment, studio marketers, and yes, Kool-Aid parent Kraft Heinz, to see just how recognizable it really is. Here are three things The Studio gets right.

[Photo: Apple TV+]

The Marketer

Kathryn Hahn is both brilliant and brilliantly over-the-top, but her character’s role in the studio decision making process is illustrated perfectly. The modern studio marketer is now a part of the project approval process for films, given the ongoing challenges of getting our attention and convincing us to actually go to the movie theaters.

But just as Remick initially ignores her advice, the marketers are also at the mercy of those above them in the studio food chain. In his Armchair Expert interview, Rogen said (starting around 50-minute mark), even though the marketer is on the greenlight committee, “Often they get directly overruled,” he said. “They would say, ‘We should not make this movie! We cannot sell it!’ And then they’re told (by studio execs) ‘Guess what, we made it anyway and if it fails you’re the one who’s going to get fired.’ That was just a really funny dynamic to have in the show.”

Of course, sometimes that dynamic works incredibly well. Back in 2023, I spoke to Universal’s CMO Michael Moses about Cocaine Bear, which went on to make $88 million worldwide on a $35 million budget. Moses’ department helped boost the hype around that film by making fun social posts like the bear snorting the chalk lines of the football field, and creating a 8-bit, Pac-Man-style online game called The Rise of Pablo Escobear.

Rogen told the podcast that the studio marketers he spoke to view themselves as more creative than the executives. “They’re like, ‘We actually make stuff. We create things. We’re making commercials, content, posters, we’re thinking of little ads, while these guys (execs) are just sitting in rooms and giving notes,” said Rogen.

Studio marketers I spoke to on background told me that the show has been a hot topic in their office hallways. They said that the balance between how recognizable and farcical it is, is a ton of fun, and they love Hahn’s sweatily trendy marketer and her willingness to tell the truth.

Bryan Cranston [Photo: Apple TV+]

The Brand Tension

Patient zero of Hollywood’s latest Great Brand IP Experiment is obviously Barbie, and the iconic doll subsequently catches some hilariously vulgar strays in The Studio.

While the hype around brands and Hollywood is very real, there is really a small number of companies like Superconnector Studios, ACE Content, and Modern Arts that have been able to bridge the two in a meaningful and consistent way.

Modern Arts cofounder and cochief creative officer Zac Ryder says The Studio’s first episode nails how hungry Hollywood is for IP that it believes audiences already know and love. “And I think it nails how hungry brands are to be part of pop culture in a real way,” says Ryder. “Now more than ever, they need each other if they’re going to survive. There’s a sense of desperation to the episode, which I think is spot on.”

In the wake of Barbie’s success back in 2023, Mattel announced plans for more IP-driven film projects that sound straight out of The Studio—like a Polly Pocket movie directed by Lena Dunham, or a Barney movie produced by Daniel Kaluuya. Dunham dropped out of the former last year, but Mattel confirmed to Fast Company earlier this month the film is still in development. The Barney project is very much in progress, written by Ayo Edebiri and co-developed and produced by A24. This sounds straight from the Remick playbook.

Ryder says a lot of studio execs still think of brands as a blank check. “That a brand will just go along with anything for an opportunity to be involved in a project,” he says. “The connection between Kool-Aid and the Jonestown massacre is an insanely far fetched, hilarious example. But I do think there’s some truth to it.”

However, as evidenced in the dramatically slowing pace of brand IP projects being announced since the initial Barbie afterglow, that attitude towards brands has evolved. “There are a lot more executives and producers in the business who see the value a brand can bring to the table, especially when it comes to marketing and understanding an audience,” says Ryder.

Ryder says there are insights for brand marketers watching The Studio. “Make sure you aren’t just getting your brand involved in a project because you want to tell people about your movie at a cocktail party,” he says. “Be very clear and very intentional with what you want the brand to get out of the deal. Also, know what you bring to the table. In many ways, the studios need you more than you need them.”

Martin Scorsese [Photo: Apple TV+]

The Kool-Aid Movie

While Martin Scorcese’s repurposed Jonestown film is so very clearly miles over the line, Stoller’s treatment is entirely believable.

Superconnector Studios cofounder Jae Goodman says that its believability extends beyond the fictional world of The Studio. “Despite the hilarity of the brand’s role in the studio, no chance any reasonable brand manager stays officially connected to the studio once the Jonestown idea appears,” says Goodman. “If the storyline veers away from Scorcese’s Jonestown, then I think there’s an opportunity down the line to do an actual Seth-and-Evan-led Kool Aid movie.”

One thing that nagged me while watching this episode was just how visible and upfront Kool-Aid was in all the jokes. The iconic Kool-Aid Man character even makes an appearance in a quick TIKTok dance diversion created by Hahn’s marketing team. Could the real Kool-Aid brand actually be involved here?

Sources close with the brand and its parent Kraft Heinz say that Rogen and Goldberg did approach the brand, including sharing scripts and rough edits, in the hopes Kool-Aid would be officially involved. Obviously, the Jonestown plotline and jokes got in the way of that.

But sources also said that Kraft Heinz has been in discussions with Apple to explore potential paths forward. While the show’s portrayal of Kool-Aid may not always align with its brand ethos, the company recognizes the value in having its brands in the cultural zeitgeist.

It’s refreshing to see that a brand has enough self-awareness and confidence to not freak out over its portrayal in a subversive comedy. I’ve got a feeling that Kool-Aid isn’t the last IRL brand to get name-checked and more as the show goes on.

As much as Mattel must be doing its best Lloyd Christmas impression while watching the show, do you think the folks at Kraft Heinz are cautiously optimistic for where all this could lead? Mr. Kool-Aid has a catchphrase for that.

How to Clean Linoleum Floors: Expert Tips for a Sparkling Shine

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 04:15:07 +0000

Discover practical tips and tricks to effectively clean and maintain your linoleum floors. Linoleum floors are like that endearing friend who always shows up with ...

The post How to Clean Linoleum Floors: Expert Tips for a Sparkling Shine appeared first on Industry Standard Design.

I Truly Can't Get Over This Brilliant Headboard Hack

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The NFL’s first-down measurements take too long. So it’s trading humans for machines

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 19:20:55 +0000

NFL games are slow. They’re 11 minutes of actual action, spread across a 3-hour-and-12-minute broadcast. You can blame that pace of the game on penalties, injuries, and, of course, commercials. But now, the NFL is teaming up with Sony to fix one of the game’s biggest time sinks: measurements.

Beginning with the 2025 NFL season, all 32 teams will switch from human measurements to computer automation. Each stadium will be equipped with six 8K Sony Hawk-Eye cameras that track the position of the ball on the field. It’s a significant upgrade to century-old technology.

Chains have been used to measure the position of the football since they were first introduced in 1898, when rules mandated the ideal tool for measuring progress down the field was “two light poles about six feet in length and connected at the lower ends by a stout cord or chain exactly five yards long.” By 1906, the five-yard standard in football switched to its current ten-yard mandate, and the chain has gone relatively changed since.

[Photo: Sony]

Now, Sony cameras will replace the chain operators—what can frankly feel like an antiquated tool in the days of slow-motion replays and 3D recreations of the field. While the cameras are installed at stadiums locally, all the footage will be sent to New York, where digital calls are coordinated by the NFL’s Art McNally GameDay Central Officiating Center.

Whereas it could take as long as 70 seconds for chains to measure the position of the ball, Sony’s cameras do the job in 30. When that 40 seconds of savings is multiplied across the 153 average plays in a football game, that’s a wild 102 minutes in savings. The game length appears to be cut in half.

[Photo: Sony]

Of course, all sorts of other things happen during those lengthy chain measurements. Every NFL broadcast is a masterclass in managing these logistics, juggling elements of the game’s narrative (wait, what penalty just happened?) and commercial cutaways (billionaire owners don’t do this for charity). And so it’s unclear how much time these new automated measurements might actually save you on a Sunday afternoon this fall.

While we’ve reached out to the NFL to clarify this point, is it too soon to bring up another sore point of fandom? Because in the face of so much amazing automated technology, the MLB is facing its own reckoning with the home plate umpire. This evolution certainly makes sense: I can see those strikes and balls better from my couch than they can from behind the batter! But at the same time, professional sports imbued with automated visual processing will face a tricky balance. While automation may improve the flow and accuracy of calls on the field, robots offer little in terms of suspenseful drama.

The Enchanting Country Estate Of The Owners Of ‘Shag’ Vintage

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 19:00:37 +0000

The Enchanting Country Estate Of The Owners Of ‘Shag’ Vintage

Homes

by Lucy Feagins, Editor

The stone circa 1857 main house on Jeremy Valentine and Grant Francis’ Clydesdale property.

The kitchen in the main house. The room is styled with a Victorian-style sideboard and vintage ceramics, including a 1960s Italian head planter. A collection of Victorian white stick vases lives on the upper shelf.

The front porch of the romantic stone cottage.

The kitchen features an industrial wooden central bench and original cast iron enamel sink.

A green 1920s glass cabinet is full of precious miscellaneous objects. Antique table and chairs. Bittossi lamp. Artwork by Ann Hall. Victorian-era ceramic jugs.

The sitting room in the main house includes a collection of early 1900s ‘alienware’ ceramics. 1970s space curtain by Paco Rabanne.

An art deco cupboard decorated by Jeremy with a marker pen after a few glasses of wine 20 years ago! 1940s lamp. Ladderback Chair by Rennie Mackintosh. Vintage Missoni rug. Alienware ceramics.

Founders of Shag Jeremy Valentine (left) and Grant Francis on their Stones property. Grape arbour made by Grant using willow rods.

Murano pink glass bedside lamps with silver shades. Black paper artwork by Geoff Nees.

A guinea fowl in the vegetable garden with chives.

Jeremy in the vegetable garden.

Grant and Jeremy walking along the path past the miner’s hut.

The old stone barn has been restored to become Jeremy and Grant’s living room and library. 1970s Terrazza Sofas by Ubald Klug for De Sede. Fretted 1800s Anglo-Indian chair. Drawings by Ann Hall. Various studio pottery on the newly installed 1850s oak fireplace. Chrome custom 1970s ball totems. Postmodern Memphis style 1980s chair and tables.

A 1990s Italian book shelf with Grant’s large collection of 1980s Memphis tableware by Japanese designer Fujimori. Postmodern side table and a Pastil chair by Eero Aarnio.

‘The house is quite eclectic but with more true Victorian finds, whereas the stone barn is a place for all of our mid-century, modernist and postmodern treasures and collections, and then the books,’ says Jeremy.

A peppercorn tree next to the milking sheds.

The small bedroom in the milking sheds. 1920s silk tasselled ceiling light.

The alcove bedroom in the milking sheds, described by Jeremy as ‘The single most restful place I’ve ever slept in. There’s a safety and quietness to the milking sheds that is quite profound. I often come down here for an afternoon nap.’

The milking sheds have been sealed to serve as extra accommodation for guests. Handmade ceramic snake lamp with parchment shade.

Jeremy at work in the cactus garden, as seen through the leaves of Macleaya cordata.

The cactus garden was created to cope in an area that receives very little water and shade.

Looking up towards the milking sheds from the cactus garden.

Jeremy Valentine and Grant Francis got the gardening bug whilst living in a large house in Malvern, which inspired the self-described city slickers and co-owners of Shag vintage stores to consider a much bigger lifestyle change.

‘We also wanted sheep and chickens and all the other things that come with the romance and pull of country life,’ says Jeremy.

They soon got their wish, trading in Melbourne life for an historic 16-acre estate, known as The Stones, in Clydesdale, Victoria (located between Daylesford and Castlemaine) in 2013.

The Stones comprises five buildings, the first being the circa 1855 wattle and daub miner’s hut, now used as a garden shed.

The main house was built in 1857, and was in the best condition of the bunch when the couple purchased the property, having been sympathetically restored by the previous owners. ‘The other buildings on the property were in various states of decay,’ says Jeremy.

Constructed using locally quarried stone, the main house looks straight out of the English countryside, complete with a cottage-style kitchen at its heart.

Restoring the stone barn has been a huge labour of love for Jeremy and Grant, who have, amongst many other upgrades, installed a new roof and insulation, and added a chimney and fireplace in their cosy main living room, which is filled with arts, books, and vintage porcelain.

Jeremy explains, ‘The house is quite eclectic but with more true Victorian finds, whereas the stone barn is a place for all of our mid-century, modernist and postmodern treasures and collections, and then the books.’

There’s also a circa 1910 creamery on site (once used to store the cream for the local butter factory, now a potting shed) and corrugated iron milking sheds added in 1920.

Jeremy and Grant have sealed the latter, offering extra accommodation for guests or a quiet place to retreat from the main house. ‘This is the space which is intentionally lost in time,’ says Grant.

Tending to the garden has been both the biggest job and joy for the couple. ‘There were only two parts to the garden when we arrived. We’ve pushed the garden out to roughly three acres,’ says Jeremy.

Selecting plants appropriate for the site — which experiences both hot dry summers and freezing winters — has been a matter of trial and error, resulting in a large cactus garden, orchard, and vegetable patches.

‘The top stalwarts here are olives, lavender and rosemary, Euphorbias, Robinias, Teucriums, Correas, Azara microphylla, agaves, cold climate cacti, walnuts, and peppercorn trees,’ says Jeremy.

The remaining land hosts rocky outcrops, creeks, and and sheep paddocks for a flock of dorper sheep.

You can see the The Stones garden yourself at an Open Gardens Victoria event on Saturday 26 and Sunday April 27.

12 years on from purchasing the property, The Stones remains a constant work in progress, which is documented on the estate’s dedicated Instagram account @thestonescentralvictoria.

Jeremy says works aren’t planned in advance, but are rather guided by ‘what the place tells us.’

‘We will probably always have something on the go here,’ he says. ‘As Grant says “it’ll be nice when it’s finished!”

My Aunt Introduced Me to This 168-Year-Old Decor Trend — Now I See It Everywhere

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 18:30:00 +0000

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A "Welly Room" Is the Charming English Home Feature You Need This Spring

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Extreme Furniture Design: Paul Cocksedge's Three-Foot Tall Marble "Bookmark"

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 17:25:42 +0000

This White Marble Bookmark is by British designer Paul Cocksedge. It pushes the boundaries, to say the least; the thing is 30cm × 22cm × 90cm (11.8" × 8.7" × 35.4"), and not easy to move at 110 kg (242.5 lbs).

"The Bookmark splits the room and I enjoy the fact that it elevates the book. It becomes a focal point. Books tend to be hidden on shelves where you can't really appreciate them. I added this curve at the bottom so it gently rocks and it's counter-intuitive to what a heavy piece of marvel should really do but it's quite playful."

"The Marble Bookmark is everything a bookmark is not: heavy to lift, difficult to carry, and bigger than the book itself. The work alters the power balance between page keeper and book, tethering it to its place on lamp can create long or wide shapes, and be adapted to fit into various interior spaces."

If you're into the concept but can't spare the floor space, Cocksedge also offers a tabletop model. This smaller version is "just" 22cm × 10cm × 24.5cm (8.7" × 3.9" × 9.6"), and weighs 13 kg (28.7 lbs).

Unsurprisingly, these will not see mass production; Cocksedge is only making 20 of each.

43 Ideas To Integrate A Secret Door Into Your Home

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 17:25:41 +0000

The idea of a secret door raises the childhood desire to have a secret space and the adult wish to have a secret room for their own, to escape from everyone and everything. Though a secret door is an uncommon solution for a modern home, it has a whole number of advantages that may inspire you to make one. What Are Secret Door Advantages? The main advantages are already named: a child’s wish to have a hidden space and an adult’s wish to have some space for their own. One more good thing about secret doors is thatthey really don’t spoil any interiors and you won’t have to think how to integrate them. A secret door allows you to hide eye sores, make visible rooms invisible for those who aren’t invited, and that goes not only to unwanted guests but also to kids when considering adult spaces like home bars. A secret door lets you hide some space making the room decluttered and more than that, it may fulfill other functions, too: provide storage space or make the space look bigger (a mirror on the door can do that). What Are Secret Door Types? Got interested in this idea? Then choose from two...

The post 43 Ideas To Integrate A Secret Door Into Your Home appeared first on Shelterness.

The $4 Cleaning Gem That Makes My Bathroom and Kitchen Sparkle

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 17:00:00 +0000

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The $30 Side-Sleeper Pillow That Made My Neck Pain Disappear

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 16:30:00 +0000

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From Italy, a Minimalist Leather Phone Case

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 16:03:44 +0000

If you've got your smartphone in a protective case, chances are it's plastic. For those that prefer a more natural material—and are willing to leave your phone naked while in use—leather goods company Hard Graft offers this $126 Masterpiece iPhone Case, which is about as minimalist as you can get.

These are artisan-made in Italy, using full-grain vegetable-tanned leather sourced from Tuscany. The interior is soft and suede-like, and the edges are hand-painted.

The case is attractive in a less-is-more kind of way, but I'm not sure how practical it would be over time; leather has a tendency to stretch, and a protective case is no good if your phone can slide out of it. The company says "To avoid stretching the leather, push the bottom of the case, while pulling on the top of your device." In other words, you have to adjust to the object, the object doesn't adjust to you. The things people do for luxury.

This 1970s Auction Home Was "Ugly" — Until a Reno Brought Out Its Best

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 16:00:00 +0000

Jessica Salem and husband Edward “removed carpets, sanded the floors, painted, installed wardrobes, and changed light fittings and window dressings” to transform this 1970s home. READ MORE...

This “Cringey” Y2K Trend Is Back in a Soft Way, According to Designers

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 15:30:00 +0000

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The graphic novel boom: How it’s changing kids’ reading habits

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 15:22:05 +0000

Sales of graphic novels have doubled over the past five years, to some parents’ dismay. But data shows these books can have a positive lifelong impact on young readers.

Could Trump’s tariffs kill fast fashion? Here is the breakdown

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 15:15:46 +0000

The Trump tariffs have the potential to transform the fashion industry. Higher prices may push consumers to purchase fewer items and extend the lifespan of their clothing.

Zara Home’s New Morris & Co. Line Is English Countryside Perfection

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Designing a Better Soldering Station, Garnering $500,000 in Pledges

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 14:21:22 +0000

SNRGY Studios, a Swedish product development firm of designers and engineers, looked into hobbyist soldering stations. Their research indicated that many peoples' soldering set-ups look like this:

SNRGY founder Alexander Osika could relate. "As a maker for many years," he writes, "l've always been frustrated by how traditional soldering stations demand dedicated desk space and how you always waste time when the right tool is not in your hand. This limitation inspired me to create SOLDR, a solution that delivers professional-grade soldering capabilities in a compact, portable format that you can set up on any desk and easily take with you wherever you go."

Osika and the design team itemized each item needed in the soldering process and integrated them into a cleaner design. Here's their design process:

The frame unfolds to reveal the heat-resistant worksurface and a grid from which accessories can be hung. Though the two plates are made of powder-coated steel, they're only 1mm thick, which keeps the overall weight down to 1,500g (3.3 lbs). There's a carry handle, and with folded dimensions of 255mm x 205mm x 35mm (roughly 10" x 8" x 1.3"), it will also fit into a backpack.

Silicone feet on the bottom provide a non-slip grip. A soldering iron holder unfolds and has space for the iron, a soldering sponge and brass wool. The holder will fit most USB-C-powered soldering irons, the company says. The holder can of course be placed on either side, to suit both left- and right-handed users.

A powerful LED lighting unit provides 1,000 lumens, allowing you to see what you're doing with clarity. The lighting unit also contains a fan with a replaceable carbon filter to extract the fumes. The fan/lighting unit is USB-C rechargeable and has a 3-hour runtime.

A quartet of helping hands are included. They have magnets on both their bases and backs, providing flexibility of placement. Their grips are heat-resistant silicone, providing a good hold, and they can be operated by one finger.

A pair of tweezers are included, each with different tips, in a holder. The included wire stripper removes the jacketing in one motion, self-adjusts to different gauges and has adjustable end-stops, providing consistent lengths of exposed wire.

A spool unit holds both the solder and the copper braid used to remove solder, with the ends of each emerging from a slot. The holder has been designed for the spools to be easy to pop out and reload. They've also designed a spool for the power cable.

A spring-loaded flush cutter is mounted in a bracket. The refillable flux syringe contains a precision-dispensing tip and a leak-proof cap.

Another nice detail is that the open-source design can be partially DIY'ed in order to save on cost. While the full kit is up on Kickstarter for $120 (and will retail for $170), if you're able to 3D print the frame and brackets yourself, the price drops down to $75 on Kickstarter (to retail for $110).

SOLDR has been a smash hit on Kickstarter; it blew past its measly $6,500 target five minutes after launching, and has currently passed $500,000 in funding, with 8 days left to pledge at press time.

This New IKEA Stoneware Kitchen Gem Looks So Much More Expensive than Just $6

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 14:15:00 +0000

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With the launch of GapStudio, Gap wants you to rethink everything you know about the brand

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Over the last year, Gap has been popping up in an unexpected place for a heritage casual wear brand: the red carpet. Last July, Anne Hathaway wore a white shirt dress with matching bralette and Bulgari jewelry. In December, Demi Moore appeared in a black knit jersey dress and moto jacket. And just this past February, Timothée Chalamet showed up in a black satin workwear set.

Zac Posen, Gap Inc.’s executive vice president and creative director, had designed all of them under the new label, GapStudio. And now, Gap is bringing GapStudio to the masses as it officially launches the new, higher-end Gap sub-brand, designed to elevate Gap’s perception, extend its reach to younger consumers, and help regain its cultural caché.

Zac Posen [Photo: Mario Sorrenti/GapStudio]

GapStudio will launch four seasonal collections a year, along with select standalone drops starting with this Spring capsule, called GapStudioCollection 01. The collection includes a range of elevated basics that play into classic styles Gap is known for, but with contemporary and trend-driven silhouettes, and elevated fabrications and construction. Prices range from $78-$248, and will be available online and in select stores starting this Thursday.

Posen’s role is far-reaching across Gap Inc, but GapStudio seems to be the most direct expression of his crossover from the red carpet gowns of his former high-end designer label to Gap Inc’s accessible everyday denim. Posen led the collection’s design processes, creative directed its launch campaign with zeitgeisty photographers, models, and stylists from his network, and onboarded a team he’s worked with for decades to bring it to life.

[Photo: Mario Sorrenti/GapStudio]

The move to revive a brand’s Americana cool factor

GapStudio is launching close to a year after Posen joined Gap Inc, where he oversees the creative direction of its brands, including Gap, Banana Republic, Athleta, and Old Navy, for which he is also chief creative officer. He and his team work out of the GapStudio atelier (that’s fashion for workshop), a new space in Gap Inc’s New York City headquarters that’s the epicenter of a new design vision for Gap.

After shuttering his namesake brand in 2019 and spending seven years at Brooks Brothers, Gap Inc hired Posen to revive the defunct heritage brand known more for its deep sales than for its fit. According to the company’s fourth quarter earnings report, net sales were down 3% in its last quarter compared to the previous year. But the full 2024 fiscal year shows that online sales were up 4% and net sales were up 1%. In-store sales remained flat.

Posen’s first collection for GapStudio offers up a tangible sense of where he wants to take the brand. The collection includes a mix of polished but contemporary everyday pieces, including denim sailor pants, cropped white button downs, and dresses (the Anne Hathaway will be available in a new color), ribbed tanks and dresses, slinky slip dresses, a denim moto and a trench coat with a pleated back. “You have to have that range within a very tight collection to be able to do that,” says Posen of the mix between casual and elevated styles. He notes that the slip dress could be worn with shoes or heels. “Daystomper, night stalker.”

[Photo: Mario Sorrenti/GapStudio]

Brand elevation through construction, silhouette, and association

Posen applied a studied eye to the construction of the pieces. He showed me the collection in the Gap Inc showroom in NYC’s Tribeca neighborhood. I noted the curved seaming of the knit dress worn by Demi Moore, which gave the dress a slight bell shape. Those were Posen’s “construction lines,” he said, so the piece didn’t have side seams. The seams themselves were made to have more dimension than a typical needle stitch, he pointed out. As he made his way through the collection racks, he pointed out more details: the $148 knit day dress, which is a fully fashioned knit, the dry hand of the rib tank, the sit of the shoulder and pick stitch of the khaki blazer.

Posen pulls out a white denim corset cincher. “Like, why not?” he asks. He paired it with a white tank dress, but it appears in a few different looks throughout the campaign, making the case for its versatility. The collection also has sweatshirts for when you’re not in the mood to be so cinched. He thumbs to the slip dress, which has seaming he originally designed for a slip dress featured in a ballet his husband choreographed. “Pajama glamour,” he declared. “Everyday street glamour. Red carpet to the street.”

That sentiment covers the range of the collection pretty well. “That’s so cute as a look, and really young,” Posen says referring to the sweatshirt look. There’s an explicit play for Gen Z with GapStudio. “It’s been really fun to be building a collection with that in mind, in terms of expanding our customer base.”

[Photo: Mario Sorrenti/GapStudio]

One way he did that, in addition to leaning into nascent Gen Z trends like bloomers, is through the GapStudio campaign itself. He tapped fashion photographer Mario Sorrenti, stylist Alastair McKimm, and supermodels Alex Consani, Imaan Hammam, and Anok Yai. He described the process of building the images as “elevating the iconic.” He hopes to tap into contemporary equivalents of the brand’s past partnerships with renowned photographers like Annie Leibowitz and Steven Miesel.

GapStudio’s “elevated essentials”

Ultimately, Posen wants GapStudio to communicate a sense of “elevated essentials,” he says. “Great items that become staples in a wardrobe. Beloved pieces you always look for. Things that have style and trends without being disposable.” To do that, he aims to balance Gap’s metrics-driven approach with his own taste. “Experimentation at any level is essential,” he says.

And it does appear that he is deeply involved with the GapStudio design team, including concepting, fitting, and fabrication. As we walked to the atelier down the hall from the showroom, he introduced me to team members he’d worked with for 10, 15, and 20 years, who now work in the GapStudio label.

Muslin toile draping by Zac Posen for a future piece in the GapStudio atelier. [Photo: Ava Imperio/GapStudio]

As we talked and made our way through the atelier, he was distracted by the work of a designer who was draping and pinning a work-in-progress garment on a figure. “I keep thinking about lowering the back on it,” Posen said to the designer. “You have to do a body suit—that’s what I said at like midnight last night—but then we can go lower in the back and lower on the side.” He’s comfortably in his element. I asked him what the piece was for. “That’s a special project,” he told me as we moved to the next station, without disclosing particulars.

Posen plans to invite other guest designers, a strategy that has worked well for bridge and mass market brands like Uniqlo and H&M. He sees the coalescence of longstanding relationships and skillsets into GapStudio as “a starting point for innovation”; a new chapter with old collaborators. The play is “desirability, absolutely elevation,” Posen says of GapStudio. The first collection, he says, is “just the beginning.”

The politically savvy reason Trump is rebranding tariff day to ‘liberation day’

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 09:30:00 +0000

President Donald Trump’s tariffs are unpopular and expected to raise costs for Americans, but he’s trying his best to message them in a positive light. When his proposed new tariffs on foreign goods go into effect on Wednesday, he’s calling it “liberation day.”

“We have ‘liberation day,‘” Trump said last week. “Many countries have taken advantage of us, the likes of which nobody even thought was possible for many, many decades.”

Trump has long been one for hyperbole, and when it comes to trade, he’s not holding back, calling the word tariff “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” But the choice of “liberation day” to describe tariffs is a true misnomer.

In Europe, Liberation Day is observed by countries in celebration of the liberation from Nazi Germany. For Trump, he simply uses the phrase to describe a day on which he enacts his agenda. Already, Trump called his 2025 Inauguration in January “liberation day” during his speech, and he’s repeating the phrase to apply to tariffs hitting Wednesday.

How to make a political phrase stick

For words and phrases to take hold, both inside and outside of politics, they must meet the FUDGE test, according to the mnemonic device devised by linguist and Predicting New Words author Allan Metcalf. He wrote that new words need to meet a threshold for frequency, unobtrusiveness, diversity, generating new forms and meanings, and endurance in order to take hold. In other words, they need to be simple to pick up, used a lot, and able to be used flexibly across different groups and in different ways.

Trump is a master of bumper sticker-style slogans and political rhetoric, repeating straightforward, memorable phrases to explain his political agenda that becomes widely used, like “America first” and “drain the swamp.” Perhaps the best example is his already tired campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” which he cribbed from President Ronald Reagan. That became so ubiquitous in Trump’s rhetoric that it spawned an acronym and inspired spin-offs, like “Make America Healthy Again.”

Whether “liberation day” can similarly take hold remains to be seen. For Daniel Rogers, a Princeton University history professor who’s studied political rhetoric, the phrase is a distraction tactic.

“Changing the subject has always been one of Trump’s favorite tactics,” Rogers tells Fast Company. “Don’t engage with those who want to know on whom the cost of tariffs is going to fall, or what steep new tariffs will mean for the cost of living. Get people to believe that tariffs will free the nation from the oppressive trade policies of the commercial enemies that surround it. Get them to think that there’s a ‘war’ going on, and that tariff is another, beautiful word for ‘victory.‘”

Whether voters outside Trump’s base ever find his trade-war rhetoric convincing seems unlikely. A majority of U.S. adults (55%) believe the Trump administration is focusing too much on tariffs and 64% think it’s not doing enough to lower prices, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday. It’s not as if Americans squeezed by years of post-pandemic inflation will greet as “liberators” the higher costs that tariffs will add to cars, housing, food, and other regularly purchased goods.

Max’s new logo just got a little more HBO

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 09:30:00 +0000

Max just got a new logo. Again. Two years after rebranding from HBO Max to just Max with new a bright blue-and-white logo, the Warner Bros Discovery-owned streaming service is making an update to its logo. This time, it’s swapping blue for a metallic black and white logo.

According to Max, the color change is part of a larger refresh. Max says the standalone logo will be in the black-and-white color scheme, but an updated color palette, chosen to allow for flexibility of the logo in app and in marketing materials, will be unveiled in the coming months.

[Images: HBO Max]

Why Max updated its logo

Max includes content from HBO and other Warner Bros Discovery brands, like Adult Swim, Animal Planet, Cartoon Network, CNN Films Discovery, and TNT, but the new logo appears to put HBO—which is responsible for top shows for the streamer like The White Lotus, The Sopranos, and Succession—back at the center. The new logo reflects the black-and-white color palette of HBO’s branding and retains the circle inside the counter of the A in “Max,” a callback to the circle inside the “O” in the HBO logo.

[Images: HBO Max]

Throughout the streaming wars, individual brands have updated their visual identities to stand out in a sea of blue logos. Disney+ updated its logo last year from blue to teal, and when Max first rolled out its blue logo, its former global chief marketing officer Patrizio Spagnoletto said the specific shade was chosen because it stood apart from Paramount blue and Prime blue. Together with the logo mark, the color communicated something about how the streamer wanted to be perceived, he said.

“With our blue and the way that the logo is designed, what we were going for is a combination of premium but accessible,” Spagnoletto said in 2023.

In black and white, the new Max logo seems to be amping up the premium aspect of its brand and downplaying the accessible. A Nielsen survey of the top 10 most-streamed shows in the U.S. may suggest why, with HBO shows like True Detective and The White Lotus among the few Max shows with enough viewers to make it onto the list dominated by Netflix, Disney+, and Hulu shows. It’s a strategy that just might work.

Here’s more proof that highways are terrible for cities

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 09:15:00 +0000

A new study confirms what urban residents and advocates have known for decades: that America’s urban highways are barriers to social connection.

The research, published this month in the journal PNAS, quantifies for the first time how highways have disrupted neighborhoods across the 50 biggest U.S. cities. Every single city studied showed less social connectivity between neighborhoods where highways are present.

“Nobody could put a number on the disruption, and now we can give a score to every single highway segment,” says Luca Aiello, a professor at the IT University of Copenhagen and the study’s lead author.

By comparing the social connections among people living on either side of highways to a baseline model of the same city with no highways, researchers found that the three U.S. cities that have experienced the most social disruption from highway infrastructure are Cleveland, Orlando, and Milwaukee.

To infer individual social ties, the study relied upon geolocated user data from social media platform X. Researchers assumed that two individuals were connected if they had mutual followers and estimated users’ home location based on where their posts were sent from.

Aiello notes that there has long been “qualitative or small-scale evidence” that highways and other urban infrastructure are disruptive to local communities, especially Black neighborhoods.

“The problem is that nobody had any way to quantitatively measure how much this infrastructure impacts or decreases people’s opportunities to connect across these large highways,” he says. “If we can quantify and put a number on this, we can quantify the damage that it is doing to our social fabric.”

In all the cities studied, the barrier effect was stronger at shorter distances (less than about 3 miles) and weaker at longer distances (of about 12 miles and more). “If someone wants to cross a multilane highway, it takes a lot of effort,” explains coauthor Anastassia Vybornova of the IT University of Copenhagen. “So highways connect over long distances, but divide over short ones.”

A long history of disruptive infrastructure

Researchers found several examples of highways as interracial barriers, where a predominantly Black community lives on one side of the highway and a predominantly white community exists on the other. Detroit’s Eight Mile Road is a classic example.

They also found examples of highways as intraracial barriers, where the highway runs directly through a predominantly Black community. Nashville’s I-40—which split up a vibrant middle-class Black neighborhood, displacing about 80% of Nashville’s Black businesses, more than 600 homes, and close to 1,500 people—is one of many such cases.

Highway infrastructure has long been connected to racial segregation practices across the United States. In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower passed the Federal Aid Highway Act, allotting $25 billion to build 41,000 miles worth of highways.

The goal was to create a way to connect cities and address the poor road conditions. Ultimately, though, building highways through cities provided white suburbanites with convenient commutes to urban centers, while also allowing governments to remove entire communities of color in the name of “urban renewal” and “slum clearance.”

As Black Americans began migrating to cities to pursue economic opportunities, wealthier white residents left urban areas for the suburbs in a phenomenon known as “white flight.” The interests of white suburbanites—who wanted to use highways to access the city for work and entertainment but also wanted to protect their own property values and businesses—heavily influenced infrastructure development plans.

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, these interstates displaced more than 475,000 households and more than 1 million people. Today, community leaders and historians alike acknowledge that highways were a key tool for segregating and displacing Black communities during the 1950s and ’60s.

A call for policy solutions

Research has long established negative long-term health impacts for those living and working near highways. The exposure to increased air and noise pollution, particularly with 300 meters of highways, can lead to an increased risk for lung disease, heart problems, premature birth, respiratory diseases, neurological disorders, and more.

But more sparse social connections have very real consequences for residents’ health and economic well-being, too.

“[Highways] limit social opportunities, and those social opportunities are connected directly to financial opportunities,” Aiello says. “Over time we see how these communities continue to lose.”

City governments and urban planners have increasingly begun working to mitigate these effects by removing or capping highways, with former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg noting in 2021 that “there is racism physically built into some of our highways.”

Last year, the Biden administration announced $3.3 billion for projects to reconnect neighborhoods divided by the federal highway system. Funds for this program, and others with equity goals, have been halted under the Trump administration.

This story was originally published by Next City, a nonprofit news outlet covering solutions for equitable cities. Sign up for Next City’s newsletter for the latest articles and events.

Barcelona is about to transform its skyline’s biggest eyesore into a stunning tech hub

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Tres Xemeneies (Three Chimneys) is a former coal-fired power plant in Sant Adrià de Besòs. Think of it as Barcelona’s own Battersea Power Station, London’s iconic power station that has been redeveloped into a technological hub (and Apple’s new London digs). Like Battersea, Barcelona’s plant is set to undergo a radical transformation into the new Catalunya Media City—a cutting-edge hub for digital arts, technology, and education.

The winning design is called E la nave va, a nod to Federico Fellini’s film of the same name, which translates to “And the Ship Sails On,” a reference to how this long-dead structure that resembles a three-mast ship will keep cruising history in a new era. According to its creators—Barcelona-based Garcés de Seta Bonet Arquitectes and New York-Barcelona firm Marvel—the project promises to honor the site’s industrial legacy while propelling it into a sustainable, community-centric future. The project is slated to break ground in late 2025 and be completed by 2028.